Blackstone Now Expects Anthropic to Get a Junk Rating After Its IPO

The anchor of a $63 billion chip-debt deal had guided partners to investment grade but now sees double-B, the top tier of junk.

Blackstone's funds put about $9 billion into the riskiest layer of the debt paying for Anthropic's chips, the Financial Times reported Friday. Now the firm is warning the other lenders in that deal that the Claude maker will probably carry a junk credit rating once it goes public, according to the FT report, which TechCrunch and Oninvest picked up.

That layer sits at the bottom of Project North Star, a $63 billion package Wall Street banks closed in late October to cover Anthropic's lease of 1.5 gigawatts of computing built on Google's chips. The safer senior slice, more than $42 billion, leans on a guarantee from Broadcom, Google's partner on those chips, whose own credit sits in the A range.

The remaining $18 billion is junior debt, backed by Anthropic's own lease payments and paid after the senior lenders if Anthropic defaults. Blackstone took half of it, chasing a yield above 10%, the FT reported, according to Oninvest. Kroll Bond Rating Agency graded that slice BB+ with a positive outlook, and Morningstar DBRS gave it a BB.

Blackstone's message to lenders has flipped. In recent months it told partners to expect an investment-grade rating, the tier for safe borrowers, before the year was out. Now, citing early guidance from the major rating agencies, Blackstone expects a double-B, the top rung of junk, the FT reported. That's about where the rating firms already put the junior slice. Anthropic and Blackstone both declined to comment to TechCrunch.

The markets account @KobeissiLetter boiled the news down to two words, "high junk," in a post on X. Anthropic filed its IPO paperwork Monday, and the post said the listing could come as soon as November.

Anthropic isn't short of cash today. It holds more than $112 billion in cash and equivalents, and investors expect the IPO to bring in about $100 billion more, according to the FT's account. Revenue hit $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, The Motley Fool noted from the prospectus. Over the same stretch, the net loss grew to $80.7 billion from roughly $13 billion.

A letter grade sounds like paperwork until it sets the bill. The prospectus lays out more than $800 billion in computing spending through 2045, Oninvest reported, and an investment-grade rating would let Anthropic borrow for it more cheaply. Without one, the pool of lenders shrinks too, because many insurers and pension funds are limited in how much speculative-grade debt they can hold.

Bankers for Anthropic and rival OpenAI have been pressing the big agencies to give both companies investment-grade marks after they list, according to the FT's account. If the estimates The Motley Fool cited hold, Anthropic starts pitching its stock to big investors the week of Nov. 9 and starts trading about a week later. Meanwhile, the anchor investor in its chip deal is telling lenders the agencies' answer will probably be no.

Source: X, retrieved October 31, 2026. Other sources: TechCrunch, en.oninvest.com, fool.com.